The Contract of Unfinished Lives

Every system had an owner. The outcome did not.One year after the Continuance Estate is dismantled, the federal government launches the National Continuity Exchange: a system designed to reconcile fractured identities across courts, hospitals, police, benefits and family services.The system works. It prevents a fatal medical error. It finds records no agency could connect. Then it matches Owen Price to a child who vanished years ago - and treats every refusal as evidence that the match is real.Owen is detained under a warrant issued for someone else. Nora discovers that the guide she wrote to protect people has become a behavioural score. Julian finds that every component passed its tests. Mara finds five contractors, each responsible for its own service and none responsible for the person their services create.When an apparent legal victory leaves one order alive in the wrong system, the cost becomes irreversible.The Contract of Unfinished Lives is Book Six of The Cryptocracy Cycle, a procedural conspiracy thriller about safeguards turned into signals, accountability divided into contracts, and a system that does not need to be conscious to make coercion look reasonable.